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faces with bright monkey eyes, all jabbering at me. It must be true, I thought. I must be in a world run by monkeys now.
    At that point, someone seized my head and tried to suffocate me by pouring hellfire into my mouth. I did a lot more coughing. Then I gently opened one watery eye and took a look at the monkey who was doing it to me.
    This one was a man. That was some comfort, even though he was such a queer-looking fellow. He had the remains of quite a large square face. I could see that, though a lot of it was covered by an immense black beard. Above the beard, his cheeks were so hollow that it looked as if he were sucking them in, and his eyes had gone right back into his head somehow, so that his eyebrows turned corners on top of them. His hair was as bad as his beard, like a rook’s nest. The rest of him looked more normal, because he was covered up to the chin in a huge navy-blue coat with patches of mold on it. But it probably only looked normal. The hand he stretched out—with a bottle in it to choke me with hellfire again—was like a skeleton’s.
    I jumped back from that bottle. “No thanks. I’m fine now.”
    He bared his teeth at me. He was smiling. “Ah, ve can onderstand von anodder!” That is a rough idea of the way he spoke. Now, I’ve been all over the place, and changed my accent a good twenty times, but I always speak English like a native. He didn’t. But at least I seemed to be in a world where someone spoke it.
    â€œWho are you?” I said.
    He looked reproachful at that. I shouldn’t have asked straight out. “Ve ollways,” he said—I can’t do the way he spoke—“we always keep one sharp lookout coming through the Boundaries, in case any other Homeward Bounder in the water lies. Lucky for you, eh!”
    I stared at his huge hollow face. “Are you one? Do you call us Homeward Bounders too?”
    â€œThat is the name to all of us is given,” he said to me sadly.
    â€œOh,” I said. “I thought I’d made it up. How long have you been one?” A long time, by the look of him, I thought.
    He sighed. “You have not heard of me in your world maybe? In many places I am known, always by my ship, always sailing on. The name most often given is that of Flying Dutchman.”
    As it happens, I had heard of him. At school—good old boring chapel-shaped Churt House—one rainy afternoon, when all the other Dominies were down with flu. The one Dominie left had told us about the Flying Dutchman, among other stories. But all I could remember about him was that long, long ago he had been doomed to sail on forever, until, unless—It didn’t matter. It was probably the same as me.
    â€œWhat happened? What did you do to annoy Them ?” I asked.
    He shivered, and sort of put me aside with that skeleton hand of his. “It is not permitted to speak of these things,” he said. Then he seemed sorry. “But you are only young. You will learn.”
    â€œWhat world do you come from, then?” I asked. “Is it permitted to speak of that? Is it the same world as me?” I sat up then, in great excitement, thinking that if we were both from the same place, then we were Bound to the same Home, and I could do worse than sail with him until we got there. Sitting up gave me a view of the cabin. I was not so sure after that. Cobwebs hung in swags from all the corners and beams. On the walls, black mold and green slime were fighting it out to see which could climb highest, and every piece of metal I could see was rusty, including the candlestick on the wormy table. The cabin floor had dirty water washing about on it, this way and that as the boat swung, and swilling round the Dutchman’s great seaboots. “Is yours the same world?” I said doubtfully.
    â€œI do not know,” he said sadly. “But I shall know if I am back there. There will be some rest then.”
    â€œWell,